Avoid Incomplete Mold Inspection Loss

Jeff Bookout

You bet, Beth. I’m more than happy to be here.

Beth O’Hara, FN

So we’re gonna dive into, Jeff actually has a presentation. ‘Cause there’s a lot of information, it be helpful to have the visuals. So Jeff, why don’t we get your slides up here, and we’ll jump in, All right, Jeff, you wanna kick us off here?

Jeff Bookout

You bet. So once we get started, at least from the medical side, is once we figure out that someone’s getting exposed to mold, has mold issues, mold illness, mass cell, whatever the case may be, the next step is the mold inspection phase. Let’s get into that property and figure out what exactly is going on, because the medical and detox program has to go hand in hand with the treatment inside of the property, because if they don’t find and treat what’s inside of the property, then the mold problems are just gonna come back and they’re gonna continue to be sick.

Beth O’Hara, FN

Let’s underscore that. Let’s underscore that because that was so important Jeff, that if people have mass activation syndrome and they’re continually exposed to mold, they’re not gonna get fully well because that mold is gonna keep triggering them, keep adding to the toxin load in their body.

Jeff Bookout

You’re exactly right. And one thing I always tell people when they call me, there’s a couple things that need to be done. Either one, we need to find these elephants that are inside that property that’s making you sick, or we need to get away from the elephants that are making you sick, right? So it’s either, find and fix or we need to flee, one of the two. Because if not, that body cannot heal.

Beth O’Hara, FN

Now can we just address right up front ’cause so many people when I start talking about environmental mold or terrified that they’re gonna have to move, they’re gonna have to throw out all their possessions. And one of the things I really appreciate about you is you really work first to find ways that people can stay in their homes. And it’s so hard when you’re really chronically sick to think about trying to find another place. And this is a terrible housing market to try to find another place. Can you just address that worry up front here?

Jeff Bookout

Of course, ’cause I think that’s one of the biggest issues that I look at too. So every situation is gonna be unique and it’s gonna be different. I do this every day, all day for a living, and I see some of the sickest people on the planet. It is rare that somebody actually has to move. It does happen. And I am super nice, I’m super empathetic, but you need to hear the truth. So I can sit there and watch you cry, and tell you need to leave if that is the case. But most cases that doesn’t happen. Most of the time there is, okay, a lot of different options. Tackle the biggest elephants that we can first that’s affordable. Here’s some other options that we can do to clean the air until these problems can be fixed ’cause Jeff, I just don’t have the money, okay? So let’s just take off the chunk at a time and let’s figure out your unique situation. 

That way we can show you the different options that you have. ‘Cause it’s rare in a case that people can just up and go. Which in a perfect world, okay, yeah, mold inside of a property, let’s just get out. That is a whole lot easier said than done. And can’t happen in most of the people that I deal with. So it’s all about showing them and walking them through the plan of what is going to work best for their unique situation that they have going on in the house. But it shouldn’t overwhelm ’em ’cause there there is different options. And once they figure out and hear those different options and see where that problem actually is, what’s going on. So as soon as we know what’s going on, then we can help ’em walk through that journey. And once somebody has somebody to kinda hold their hand a little bit to walk through that journey, Beth, it makes that experience so much easier and it’s bearable now. Whereas before, I’m fight or flight, I’m scared to death, don’t know what’s going on. So, hey, let’s figure out what’s going on together and let’s walk you through this process.

Beth O’Hara, FN

And I just wanna share Jeff, my experience working with you which is, you may remember this, that I had some mold plates come in the house that we had finally found after six months of house shopping, It was the only one I could find that was mold-free. We snagged it up and we moved in, and then it started to get humid and we had record rains, and I started feeling ill, and I was getting more inflamed, and feeling worse, so we ran mold plates. And our basement mold plates came back with these extremely high levels, like in the twenties of aspergillus. And do you remember me calling you in a panic?

Jeff Bookout

Yes.

Beth O’Hara, FN

You said, I saw your mold plate come through. I knew you knew you were gonna call me today. And what I loved Jeff was one, you reassured me and you said, you can clean this up, this is very doable, you helped calm me down. I mean that in itself meant the world to me. I wish I’d asked you at the beginning, but I wanna ask you now. So many mold inspectors Jeff, don’t understand the types of health issues that I’ve dealt with from mold, that most of the people of mass cell activation deal with from mold. They don’t understand the level of mold that can make us sick. That doesn’t make, for example, my six two linebacker size husband sick, but can make me really ill. How did you get into the medical side of mold inspection and remediation and understanding this from a chronic illness perspective?

Jeff Bookout

Yeah, so doing this is a passion for me because unfortunately I had to go through it. And when I say I had to go through it, those of you who have kids, the pain of a child is worse than pain for yourself. And I think a lot of parents can empathize to that. So it was my youngest daughter getting sick, not me. When it comes to mold on the genetic stud, I don’t have HLA, MTHFR. I eat it, I swim in it, I live in the mold world all day long. I do not get sick from it, but my youngest daughter was. And back then, and this is 18 years ago, no one knew the information that we know today. So here I have this daughter, we would go and sleep in the basement and the second day we’re in that basement, she would have 104 degree fever by 2:00 a.m. in a strep throat. What’s wrong with you?

Beth O’Hara, FN

How old was she?

Jeff Bookout

Great question. Three to five year old range. So she’s young, right?

Beth O’Hara, FN

Very little.

Jeff Bookout

And I’m looking at her going, what is wrong with you? I slept in the same place you did, I ate the same things that you ate, I grew up in this house. What is wrong with you? And I was convinced that it was either big red gum or Sunny Delight. That’s the only thing that’s different in this house than my house. That’s gotta be it. The next time we go and sleep in the basement, showing enough 104 degree fever, 2:00 a.m. a strep throat. She would get strep throat 16 to 20 times a year. Took out her tonsils, strep would attack the side of her face. Luckily I have an infrared camera. So I’m looking at an infrared camera, on the side of her face is 111 degrees. It looked like I hit her as hard as I could on the side of her face. Is just purple and red. What is going on? And luckily I had a lot of people happen to follow or fall into my lap. One was a guy who got sick from mold exposure. He traveled the country helping people, nobody could get him better. 

He went back to work, developed all these own formulas to get himself better. And luckily I had access to him and he helped me through this journey. ‘Cause back then she has HLA. Liver’s not producing glucosinolate to remove toxins out of the body. So back then nobody knew about HLA, MTHFR, APOE. All we knew was IgE and IgG sensitivities. So that was when I… And at the same time I was switching jobs and it happened to be into the mold field, and is amazing how everything just kind of work together to allow me to get my daughter better extremely quickly. So since then, obviously, I live this world, so I’m right in the middle of it. Kinzie now is in college and I had to go look at her apartment not too long ago. Dad, I’m not feeling good in my apartment, I think there’s a mold problem, can you come up and take a look? Sure enough baby. So this kinda allowed me to really start looking at the medical side of this. 

And really from day one, that’s kind of where I spent my focus. I got trained just like everybody else was trained to be a mold inspector and a mold mediator. But everyone is looking for the big black, hairy stuff on the wall, right? I wanna see it. And sometimes it’s that easy. But if it was that easy, you don’t need people like me. You know where the problem is. But I always hear, Jeff, I have a clean house, I don’t have a mold problem. But you don’t see what’s behind your master shower. Or you don’t see what’s going on behind the scenes. Yes, your house is spotless, but here’s this hidden mold that is making you sick. And it can make all of us sick, and we’ll kind of dive into that a little bit too. But I got into it from the medical side because my daughter was getting sick and nobody knew what in the world was going on, so.

Beth O’Hara, FN

We got hit a few times. So it wasn’t just the one time, but there were few times.

Jeff Bookout

Multiple. And we’ll even get into, I have some photos of my own house because everybody has water intrusion problems. And if water intrusion isn’t dried out within 48 hours, mold begins to grow. And they get it’s exponential after that. So I don’t care how good of a house mold-proof house that you can build. If you have water going to it, you can have a mold problem. So it’s gonna happen to us all. Now let’s figure out how to look at it, how to find it, and how to manage it.

Beth O’Hara, FN

Yeah, and I just wanted people to know that background of you that I know about why you understand this at a much deeper level. So thank you for sharing that story.

Jeff Bookout

You bet. And it’s how I feel about and how I look at my job. Everybody I see, I don’t care who you are, I don’t have any of your medical data yet, I see you in this toxic whiskey barrel. Okay? You’re in that toxic whiskey barrel, it’s up to your chin and you’re drowning in it. My job, I feel for the next step is to go into that property, reduce that toxic load so your own body and your doctor can get you better. Now let’s look at how I do it. There’s two different ways I look at doing things, and you’ll see me talk about elephants and red flags quite a bit. But it’s all about going into that house to start with. There’s a lot of different ways initially to look for mold. And a lot of doctors out there do this. Okay, let’s do some air sampling, let’s do SDA AGAR plates, let’s do spore trap analysis, let’s do ERMI. It is all data. I’m a huge data guide. There’s a problem or limitation with all of these air sampling methods. So let’s say you have mold all behind your master shower, it’s fat, happy, and content behind that master shower so you don’t see it, right? But mold makes you sick three different ways. The mold spore itself, the mycotoxins that it produces, and the MVOCs that it produces, mold vault or organic compounds. So those three… Yes, yeah, correct.

Beth O’Hara, FN

‘Cause people know them as mycotoxins, yeah.

Jeff Bookout

And that they’re actually different. So MVOCs is what I describe as a side effect of mold actively feeding. So when you smell the musty old basement, that is mold actively feeding it, it’s producing an odor. The best analogy I have for you, imagine your husband goes to Taco Bell, he eats a lot of Taco Bell. There is a side effect of that, right? So very similar with mold. So when mold is actually feeding, usually it can let off an odor. So that odor basically has four different distinct odors to my specific nose. But when I smell that, or if you smell a odor a musty odor inside the house, there’s a great chance that that’s NVOCs. It’s telling you that hey, there’s a problem inside this house, we need to go figure out where it’s at. Where’s that smell coming from? There’s a problem. So those are the three ways that mold makes you sick. But let’s say mold works like a dandelion out in the yard, right? Dandelion as soon as you kick it, blow it, disturb it, thinks it’s gonna die, throws it mold spores out to regenerate somewhere else. 

So all these are looking for mold spores or high full fragments in ERMI’s case. So there’s limitations to each one of these ways of air testing. Some of ’em are a lot more expensive than others, and we can get into extreme detail into that. But the biggest thing is, is hey, it’s a great first tool, one of the tools of about $40,000 worth that gear that I’m gonna bring into your house to find where these problems are coming from. And which is I think the most important thing is finding the elephant. ‘Cause I just do air testing and it tells me I have a problem, that’s all it’s telling me. I need to know where that problem is. So looking at infrared cameras, moisture meters, VOC meters, ultrafine particle counters, EMF meters. There’s a lot of different ways that we need to go into that property and find the elephants and red flags in the house that are causing the issues that you’re having in your body.

Beth O’Hara, FN

So let’s answer a couple questions here. On the last slide. One, you talked about the four different smells that your nose picks up. And one of them is that musty basement kind of smell. Can you describe the others? ‘Cause I don’t think people are as familiar with connecting those with mold.

Jeff Bookout

You bet, urine. And I just say what it is, it’s the urine smell to me. But my nose can distinguish between human urine, pet urine and mold. I don’t know why. I guess that’s a gift that I have. But it has what I call the urine odor to it. Number three, is what I call the old antique smell. I imagine my grandma’s sewing machine or this real old piece of furniture that has a very unique odor to it. One time when I smelled it, I was around a washing machine in a lady’s house in Boulder. And I went to the washing machine, couldn’t find anything. Left, walked two feet, I smell it again. So I go back to the washing machine, can’t find it. I walk away again, smell it again. Turn around and go back. And when I turn around and go back the third time, I see six picture frames that were backed up against the side of the wall next to the washer. It was the picture frames. They were in a house full that was heavily mold damaged, and they brought ’em from the old house to the new house. But you could smell it all over the wood framing. So that’s the third, is what I called the old antique smell. Fourth is what I call the sweet banana smell. And I don’t know if you smelled the glyco that they use in fire suppression systems. So let’s say your office has a fire sprinkler system. So a lot of times it’s the liquid that’s in that. To me it has what I call the banana smell, a sweet banana smell. And that’s usually more yeast or bacteria that I’m smelling into those areas. But that’s the four distinct smells that my nose has.

Beth O’Hara, FN

Interesting. And so I’ve also taken away from this that we have to use a lot of different testing methods. We can’t just use… Some people are just doing the air sampling, like the spore trap and that’s it. And they might do a visual inspection. But you are going really in depth here. And when somebody has these kind of health issues, you need to make sure that a mold inspector is gonna be this detail, oriented and this comprehensive. And the other thing that is jumping out here for me, Jeff, is that you have EMF meters and I have not had an inspector tell me that that’s part of their toolkit. Can you talk about that a little bit more? Why are you bringing in the EMF meters? We definitely wanna be looking for EMF ’cause we know it’s a trigger for mass activation. Why is it in your toolkit?

Jeff Bookout

The reason why it’s my toolkit, and I don’t have all the data for you Beth, I’m a pretty smart guy in a lot of areas. EMF is an area that, here’s my belief. And I think eventually this data come out. But with like 5G or 4G or EMS, let’s say I have power lines all outside my house, and you walk outside and you can hear that buzzing, right? Well let’s go back to how mold works. Mold works like a line out, and the yard sees it, it feels threatened or disturbed, it can throw out molds spores or mycotoxins to either defend itself or regenerate somewhere else. So now I imagine you have this ultrasonic sound is the best way I can describe it to you. It’s kinda like they make ’em for pet collars and you hear this high pitch that you can’t hear but your pet can, and it drives it crazy. It tells it to stop doing what it’s doing. That’s how I look at 5G. You have this sound or this intrusion that’s coming into your house, this electronic that’s coming into your house, and mold doesn’t know what it is. It’s scared. So it puts it into a constant fight, fight or flight. And it wants to fight. So it’s either gonna be producing mycotoxins or mold spores out in the air all the time because it feels it’s threatened all the time. Does that makes sense?

Beth O’Hara, FN

Yeah, definitely. And I have this suspicion as well, and I think that’s a big part, not the only reason, but a big reason why mold toxin in people’s homes has been getting to be a worse and worse issue, especially in the last 20 years as we’ve brought in all the wifi routers, the smart devices, all the smart homes. And I’ve even noticed in rentals that I’ve had like Airbnbs, the mold is so much worse in the smart homes than in the homes that just aren’t wired up and they have a low powered router. And my guess is that there’s a connection there.

Jeff Bookout

Yeah, and my pretty educated guess is the elephant, you may have some mold issues in the house, but it’s not these huge elephants. So they’re still elephants. But because we have all that energy going on, it’s putting even that smaller problem that’s usually a small elephant in somebody’s house, now it’s a huge elephant, ’cause that mold is constantly being threatened.

Beth O’Hara, FN

Now Jeff, we know that we’ve had mold on the planet longer than human beings have been on the planet. And we know that there has been mold in people’s homes for generations. And even I think about, some of my relatives that had root sellers, and going down the air and getting the canned green beans out of there and things like that. And people weren’t sick back then like they are today. So the EMFs may be a factor. But I know you’ve identified some other things that may be factors as well. Can we talk about that and why? Why is mold a bigger issue now than it was say in the fifties, sixties and seventies?

Jeff Bookout

Yeah, Beth, and I think there’s a couple reasons for that. But probably one of the biggest things that I’ve looked at is how a house is built. Just like you’re saying, grandma, she had a dirt floor basement, jammed jars with mold growth all over ’em, but nobody was sick. Well her house leaked like a sieve. She got so much air exchange inside of that property, and dilution is the solution.

Beth O’Hara, FN

So we didn’t have the VOCs building and the mycotoxins building in the air.

Jeff Bookout

You’re exactly right. Because now we’ve energy efficient and everything. Since 1974, the air ball embargo, everything just, hey let’s build these energy efficient houses. And they even put one plan, it’s called the Arkansas Plan. And they basically vis queen put plastic around the entire house. Now you have any type of moisture intrusion behind the wall, it can’t dry out. And then it all starts growing up the wall. And now everything in that house stays in that house. I always love the analogy scooby-doo green gas, ’cause everybody can now see what mold spores, mycotoxins, NBOCs look like, because now they can see this green gas. So you have all this green gas behind a wall or master shower cavity, that green gas comes out into the air, gets into our HVAC system, gets distributed through the entire house. And until you open these windows and doors, it is extremely potent inside that house. Now I think there’s other factors too. I think there’s food, processed food, all the metal toxins that we have. There’s some other issues, but the EMS. But definitely the way that we build our houses, and it not communicating with the breathable air outside getting good air exchanged and no dilution, I think that is one of the biggest reasons why we have more problems inside the house.

Beth O’Hara, FN

And I know we had another round of that around 2000. There’s a certain level of issue in pupils whose houses were built after 1974. I don’t know all the details. I know you probably do with this increased energy efficiency around 2000 again. And then we’ve got even tighter than we had before of these houses for energy efficiency. So you can have just a micro leak in a water pipe or I think about we disconnected the line to the fridge ice dispenser, because I knew like this line’s gonna leak at some point. And I’d rather make ice in ice cube trays that I can control then have that water line going to that fridge, and I know it’s gonna leak under that floor at some point.

Jeff Bookout

Yeah, and here’s one thing, I’m glad you brought that up, ’cause if we don’t get a chance to talk about later, I’d be disturbed. I went around and bought water sensors. Specifically I bought the goy off Amazon, but a lot of different companies make them, but they’re little battery-operated. You put it behind your washing machine, behind your refrigerator, underneath your sinks. So if there is a leak, water hits the top of that, or side of that or under that, that alarm is gonna go off. So it tells you, you have a leak. And if you can find that leak and stop it and have it dried out within 48 hours, you’re not gonna have mold. So getting those water alert systems in place would be… I wish everybody did it.

Beth O’Hara, FN

So that’s a great tip to use the water alarms. And I wanted to go to one more thing that you and I have talked about before, that’s playing a role in the increase in environmental mold issues, and mold toxicity, mold illness from environmental mold. And that is the fungicide paints and all the other fungicides that are being overused, most likely had all that antibacterial overuse, and now we’ve got superbugs and we’ve got antibacterial resistant bacteria. Can you talk about how that’s happening here in the fungal kingdom as well?

Jeff Bookout

Yeah, so strands now all of a sudden you’re seeing certain strains of Candida being killers. Candida, hey, that’s just a yeast. And now we have some types of Candida out there that can actually take your life. So you’re exactly right. So we’re using a lot of those biocide, spermicides fungicides, even ozone, which will hit later, and they’re building up a resistance to those things. And over time, some of the things that we’re using inside of our house, we shouldn’t have been using. We thought we were doing a good thing by being preventative. And probably the best prevention that we should have done is use building materials in our house that are a retardant for mold. So we use sheetrock. I’ve got cellulose paper on both sides of gypsum. It’s a food source mold loves, cellulose. We’ll use cellulose insulation. We’ll use paper-backed insulation around our kitchen sinks, under your kitchen sink. Is that concrete board, hardy backer board or is that just sheetrock? Your platform underneath your kitchen sink, it’s formaldehyde high loaded press particle wood instead of plywood that’s sealed. So the building materials that we use is probably the best defense for something like that. Instead of using a mold resistant paint or something else of of that nature that’s actually doing just the opposite of what we want, we’re now producing these superbugs when we shouldn’t.

Beth O’Hara, FN

And so just to really bring this home about why this is such a huge trigger for people with mass activation syndrome, I’ve seen studies that were done, and they’re outdated at this point. But what I have read was there was a study that was done in the 1980s. So even before we had all these EMF issues and before the second round of building code changes, that showed that something like 35% of all schools had water damage that can lead to toxic mold issues. There was a study that looked at 50% of homes, and it was a very high amount. It was over 70% of commercial buildings. What are you seeing in terms of… And now I know some of this is gonna be biased by, you don’t get called into buildings that probably don’t have issues. But what do we know about the prevalence of mold toxicity in buildings today?

Jeff Bookout

It is far greater than any data that I have seen published. So I would say, and I get asked that question all the time, and I tell ’em, yeah, it’s a loaded question. I get called in because someone’s getting sick from mold. But you’d be amazed at how many people don’t speak up. I was at a sheriff station, and two people in that entire building were complaining. A hundred people and two were complaining. Well those two are the reason why they found the major massive mold problems that they had in that property. I would say at least 90% of every building that I walk into or home residential that I walk into is at least gonna have one elephant, what I call an elephant inside the house that would make somebody sick. And you say, no, I don’t have HLA, I don’t have MTHFR. My APOE is two, three, things aren’t going through my blood brain barrier. I do have some mold sensitivities on the IgG panel. But if I stay around a big enough problem for a long enough period of time, I don’t care who you are, your immune system will get broken down and you’ll end up just like my youngest daughter.

Beth O’Hara, FN

Well, and you know Jeff, I don’t have HLAs or MTHFR either, but I was exposed to a lot of chemicals in childhood. I grew up in farmland and there was mold in the home that we grew up in and I had lime. So I think that, and what I’ve seeing in the practice as well is it’s now beyond those genetic variants that a lot of people are getting ill even without those.

Jeff Bookout

Yeah, ’cause in this. So go back to this toxic whiskey barrel. I always say it’s amazing how many people are up to their ankles, or their calves in a toxic whiskey barrel and they just don’t know it. They have lime, they have barnell, they have these other autoimmune issues going on. But until mold is introduced, mold is the atom bomb in the particular matter world. As soon as mold is introduced, all of a sudden that toxic whiskey barrel just gets completely filled up. And then all these other issues that they have had manifest themselves. Oh you have line, let’s treat the line. Well you can’t treat that line until you get the mold back under control.

Beth O’Hara, FN

Right. And I’ve seen people that they knew they had been bitten by ticks earlier in their life, and then they had gone 20 years, they had rarely, really spent time in nature, they hadn’t hardly been outside, no tick bites. And then they had a mold exposure and now the lime was active. And we’ll see that quite a bit. Most people have Epstein-Barr, but Epstein-Barr will get active with the mold exposure. And it can go the other way. People can have had mold exposure early in, have those mold toxins in their body, but they can stay somehow ahead of it, and then they get bitten by a tick, and now the mold issue, the mold toxicity is a big deal because it’s like the straw that breaks the camels back. And I think we’re all kind of swimming in that toxic soup because of the amount of chemicals we’re exposed to is astronomical compared to a hundred years ago.

Jeff Bookout

It is. And so many of my mold patients are also chemically sensitive. They go hand in hand. I don’t wear cologne, I don’t use dryer sheets just because I’m going into these houses where people are super sensitive.

Beth O’Hara, FN

I can tell you firsthand, I greatly appreciate that. I know most of the people listening to this probably do too. Thank you. That was such great information on the background. One other quick question while we’re talking about testing. So a lot of people will run a mold plate, and the mold plate key that they get tells them if they have four more spores to not be worried. But you and I have talked about a whole different key for people that are sensitive, people have massive activation that needs to be more stringent. Can we step through that? ‘Cause I think that’s so critical for people to have that information.

Jeff Bookout

Yeah, and that’s any of these ways of air sampling, but specifically the auger plates, it’s picking up what’s viable into the air. But okay, you have zero to four colonies, and all four of those colonies are a toxic mold. Or you have two toxic molds that are showing up on the same auger plate or the same room, but your total’s only four. Statistically that’s normal even for a medically sensitive patient. But that’s a huge red flag for me as a mold investigator. So when I’m seeing that, hey, we need to start asking some bigger questions, because that’s an indicator that there’s a larger problem going on inside of that property. Same way with air sampling. Hey, Kayton only showed up at one raw colony, which is 13 counts per meters cubed. Well, it shouldn’t have shown up in the house at all. 

So even though a mold inspector or a lab is clearing that information, doesn’t mean that there’s not a hidden problem hiding somewhere else. And I’ve seen the same thing with ERMI. ERMI is just my least favorite method of testing. I never look at the ERMI score, but I do look at the types of molds that are showing up. I had a lady in in Colorado that was, I think she was a negative 1.8, something like that on ERMI. So it looked great, but she had 16 Chaetomiums. Oops. And sure enough, and I did the inspection on the house, and there’s this major mold problem less than eight feet away from her HVAC system. So I don’t look at scores, I don’t always look at numbers, I look at the types of molds. And their indicators for me is something bigger going on.

Beth O’Hara, FN

So can you just share which types of mold on the ERMI that if they’re showing up even at low levels, and even if the ERMI is at low levels, it probably need to be reaching out for help?

Jeff Bookout

Great question. So the first place my eyes go on an ERMI is Stachybotrys and Chaetomium. You know, they’re heavy and sticky. A lot more difficult to get on some of these other methods. It’s what I do like about the ERMI. So if I see Stachybotrys and Chaetomium above a five, I think there’s a problem. Jeff, Chaetomium is just showing up at an eight or a 10, but I don’t have any Stachy. Well, Stachybotrys and Chaetomium, the brother system molds more than likely they’re traveling together. So we just haven’t found the Stachy yet. It’s probably there, it’s just a matter of identifying it. The next is your aspergillus penicillin group. I go through those. Now those levels, I will allow it to be a lot higher than a lot of people will. But you have one of those that’s showing up high that kind of leads me to source areas. The bad thing about ERMI, most people when they do ERMI, they do a slipper and they do it of the whole house. I did upstairs, I did main level and I did the basement. And it doesn’t help guide me to a direction. Even ERMI on Cladosporium levels or all scenario levels, which is your group two on an ERMI. So I walked into a lady’s house that had 44,000 Cladosporium, which led me to my first question to her, do you have a dirt floor crawlspace? No I don’t have a crawlspace. Well she had two of them. She just didn’t know it, they were hidden. And in those crawlspace was significant visible mold growth all throughout both of them. While the Cladosporium is what led me to find where the actual problem source was.

Beth O’Hara, FN

Now that’s so helpful ’cause we know Cladosporium doesn’t make mycotoxin. So we’re not usually looking at a toxic mold. But you’re interpreting it from your experience going, ooh, that’s a really high amount, that shouldn’t be there even at that level. What about Mucor and ?

Jeff Bookout

I’ll hit Mucor first. Especially on an SCA auger plate, pets will give off Mucor, I see that a lot. But most times my immediate brain goes to, if you have Mucor at least in higher amounts, more than likely you have an ongoing leak. And Mucor led me to, even it showed up in one colony on an auger plate, it can lead me to, okay, in that kitchen let’s look for a leak. And where I did find the leak is where, oh hey, they’re Stachy all underneath your platform of your kitchen sink. Stachy didn’t show up on the mold plate, but the Mucor did and it led me to the ongoing leak that led me to find the more extensive damage.

Beth O’Hara, FN

So if there is Mucor, you might find Stachy as well.

Jeff Bookout

So it depends on how long that water intrusion had been going on to white top of mold. And I’ll quickly go over that. So when a mold intrusion isn’t dried out within 48 hours, mold begins to grow. Those are generally my baby molds, right? Coliform, microform, soil contamination type molds. Then it stays about a week of not being dried out, aspergillus, penicillin generally show up. Now you change moisture content 1%, a different toxic mold can show up. You have these other molds that are showing up and going away depending on moisture content. But that moisture intrusion stays for a month or longer, there’s where you see your Chaetomium and Stachybotrys start to show up. And generally if you have an ongoing leak and you don’t know about it, chances are you haven’t known about it for quite some time. And a month or more or a year or more or two years or more. And that is gonna be stacking Chaetomium that’s in behind me.

Beth O’Hara, FN

And this is why I recommend people start with, if they’re gonna do home testing, they do the agar plates, the mold plates and the ERMI. Because we know that Stachybotrys, Chaetomium, these aren’t gonna grow on a mold plate.